Print at Home

I recently had to design our print at home ticket documents. Read this and save time. You're welcome in advance.
Print at home ticket design Basics:

• Use ctrl+x to remove a field
• If you put html in a free-text field, be sure to include the / at the end of image, br, or other tags e.g. <br /> instead of <br >.
• Always use PDF format! When html is emailed to gmail, alo, etc, the ticket gets completely destroyed! Try it, its kind of funny to see.
• always test whenever you make a change, to make sure you don't get the 'print at home error', which really could mean anything, so keep track of your changes too.
• use the export utility to backup functional ticket designs (or use the document copy feature)

Date format:
To format dates in the doc designer:

• Day name: ddd
• day number: dd or d for 03 or 3
• Month name: mmm (like Aug , Sep, Nov)
• Month Number: mm
• Year: yy or yyyy for 09 or 2009
• Hour: h or hh for 7 or 07
• minute: mm
• AM / PM: ampm

So for example you want the format
Sun Aug 3 2008 7:00 PM
use
ddd mmm d yyyy h:mm ampm
and enter this in the 'format' field when you have the event date highlighted.

Layering Images and Text:

I could not get text to appear on top of an image. the designer makes it look like you can control what appears on top of what if you have 2 fields overlapping. It appears to save the info, but when the designer is closed and re-opened, it does not save the change. In addition, i did not see a place in the database to store any ordinal information. I tried to get around this using transparent images - but - when printed from firefox, text underneath a transparent image does not show on the printed page.

Concatenating Fields:

You can concatenate fields by using
concat(@FirstName,' ',@LastName)
or concat(@fieldname1,'anytext',@fieldname2)

Barcodes:

I had the barcode width set to 300, the pah barcode width set to 300 as well, but the image still measured in at 200 pixels. If anyone figures out how to get a bigger barcode, kudos and let me know. for now, 200 pixels seems to work fine and scans fine when printed.

Lets talk about Scanning

Our setup:
Scanners: Symbol mc50 pocket PC's
2 wireless antennae
1 web server (an old dell running server 2000, has PE installed on it),
some customized asp and sql.

An overview of how it works:
Scanner reads barcode, sends it via web form to web-server. The web server processes the asp page and sends the info to a Stored proc on the ticket server.
The stored proc validates it (using also included stored procedures) and returns a result code and message to the web server. The result is included on the scanner web page. the page plays a background noise depending on the result-code (either pass or fail)

A few problems we ran into from the start:
The scanners send the 'enter' key after a scan, but the web page does not submit the form if there is more than 1 form field. I customized the page so that it only has 1 field (barcode), and a submit button - The selection for check and scan is hardcoded to be only scan. Now it works.

Our logic as to who passes and who is denied entry, when it relates to reprinted tickets, differed from Blackbaud's defaults. For this I made custom validation sp's, so that reprints are handled exactly right. To do this, you need to first have a look at barcodes_checkticket and barcodes_checksubsticket to get an idea of how it works. There is a table named scanningconfig that points pe to the sp to do the actual validation. Note that there is one for single tickets and one for subscription. As of the last version (3.3.10), the default logic between the 2 is consistent.

There is another table called Barcodes_ResultMessages, which stores the text for the reurn message. This is probably an easier customization that most people could do. Just don't change the number field ;-)